Gov’t Mule has been combining elements of classic Southern rock, blues and jam into a cohesive voice for 30 years and is still managing to come up with fresh, new albums.
Their tour will bring them through Albuquerque on Feb. 21, at Kiva Auditorium. We sat down with band frontman Warren Haynes for a talk about their latest offerings, Peace…Like a River and Time of the Signs.
The Paper.: I just listened to the newest EP, Time of the Signs, last night. I know the material for Peace…Like a River was created during the pandemic, when did you put together Time?
Haynes: That was all during the same time period. We just felt like those songs had a theme and feeling of their own.
Are you gonna be playing any of those songs at the show?
We’re just starting to play some of the tunes from Time of the Signs. Every show is different. We never know until a day or two before the show what we’re actually going to play, because we like to make a point of doing three or four shows in a row without repeating anything. And we also like doing a completely different show than we did the last time we were in any particular market. So, it’s hard to say at this point what we’re going to play, but it’ll most likely be songs from each different period of our career, so to speak.
Do you have any more material from that time still hanging around?
No, there’s a few unfinished songs left. But those are all the ones that we completed. We did a lot during that time. We did Heavy Load Blues in that same time period as well. We recorded a lot of material, but we managed to make most of it available.
Peace has a lot of guest spots on it. Was it weird bringing other people into the process with you?
No, you know, with the exception of [singer-songwriter] Celisse—who I’ve only known two or three years now—everybody else was folks that I’ve worked with in the past or we’ve worked with in the past. Old friends.
Once we got into the process, it was like: “Oh, it would be great to have Ivan [Neville] and Ruthie [Foster] on this. It would be great to have Gibbons on that. It would be really cool to have Billy Bob [Thorton] do the spoken word thing for “The River Only Flows One Way.” Celisse and I had just worked together at a benefit, and I had become a fan of her music, and I thought it would be really cool to get her involved.
So what’s on the horizon?
We’re going to tour up until sometime in March. At that point, we’ll have been on the road on-and-off for about a year. So I think Gov’t Mule is going to take some well deserved time off.
This is our 30th anniversary, so we’re going to be scouring the vaults to see what unreleased music we can make available in honor of that.
Gov’t Mule
Feb. 21 7:30PM
Kiva Auditorium
401 2nd Street NW
Tickets: $25-$59